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This book is inspired by that honest doubt which holds more faith than fifty warring creeds. The author, a practicing psychoanalyst, noting the difference between his clinical observations and classic descriptions of analytic patients, has turned for explanation to the sociologist. This explanation he found by correlating a social phenomenon, the institutional process or myth making, with Freud's primary process, and instrumentation or tool making with Freud's secondary process. He shows that the ever-increasing acceleration of the latter, compared to the stagnation inherent in institutions, is responsible not only for the present chronic international tension but also for the diminished importance of the superego today. A superego, weak in comparison with that of an older generation, lessens the scope of the unconscious, since it exerts less repression. The ego, in so far as it is freed from its old masters, God and the devil, now has a capricious tyrant in reality that cries, 'Faster, faster', for adaptation that will match technological changes. Without the fixity of the superego, the goals that gave life meaning waiver so that individuals lose self-awareness and purpose. When seeking certainties in psychoanalysis they are often disappointed.
The material denoted by this bald oversimplification has two components, the intellectual and the emotional. Precisely and even wittily, often with striking similes, the author has depicted the intangibles and generalities of the intellect. The second, the emotional, he has conveyed by a series of episodes of commonplace events in the life of a three-generation family, told with poignant simplicity that compels the reader to identify with the characters.
Beguiled by the technical excellence of this presentation, the reader may not find himself questioning these assumptions and assertions until he has finished the book. Then he may well ponder to what extent people today have exchanged acceptance by the imago of an id